Thomas Newman - Writer

Composer.
Nationality:
American.
Born:
20 October 1955.
Family:
Married to Ann Marie.
Education:
University of Southern California where he studied with Frederick
Lesemann and David Raksin; Yale where he studied with Jacob Druckman,
Bruce MacCombie, and Robert Moore, with a masters in musical composition.
Career:
Played keyboard in The Innocents rock band; composed first feature score
for James Foley's
Reckless
, 1984; composed music for
Amazing Stories
TV series, 1985; commissioned to create a seven-minute symphonic piece,
"Reach Forth Our Hands" for the city of Cleveland
bicentennial, 1996.
Awards:
Australian Film Institute Award, Best Original Music Score, for
Oscar and Lucinda
, 1998.
Agent:
Gorfaine and Schwartz Agency, 13245 Riverside Drive, Suite 450, Sherman
Oaks, CA 91423–2172, U.S.A.

Films as Composer

1984

Reckless
(Foley);
Revenge of the Nerds
(Kanew);
Grandview U.S.A.
(Kleiser);
The Seduction of Gine
(
Another High Roller
) (Freedman)

"Stanley Kauffman on Films: In the Midst of Life," in
The New Republic
(New York), 7 December 1998.

* * *

Thomas Newman was born into that outstanding cinemusical dynasty, the
Newmans of Hollywood, on 20 October 1955. His father was Alfred Newman,
the legendary composer, conductor, and musical director of 20th
Century-Fox studios, and one of the key figures in the development and
refinement of film music during the studio era. His uncles were Lionel and
Emile Newman, also both prominent composers and conductors at Fox during
the same period.

Newman attended college for two years at the University of Southern
California, before graduating with a Masters in Music from Yale
University. After graduation Newman garnered experience in both performing
and in writing for musical theater. For several years he played the
keyboard in a rock band, The Innocents, and with an improvisational group,
Tokyo 77. During this same period, and under the championship of musical
theater legend, Stephen Sondheim, Newman made a musical theater piece,
Three Mean Fairy Tales
, produced as a workshop production by the Stuart Ostrow Foundation.

Newman reports that his indoctrination into film music was occasioned by
his relationship with his uncle, Lionel Newman: "Because my uncle
Lionel was head of music at Fox during my high school and college years, I
went down there a lot and watched John Williams conduct some of his early
Irwin Allen movies like
The Towering Inferno
and
The Poseidon Adventure.
I think because of my uncle Lionel's relationship with John
Williams, one of my first gigs in Hollywood was orchestrating one of the
cues from
Return of the Jedi
(1983), when Darth Vader dies at the end. John's sketch was so
complete that it was more of an exercise and a bone-toss, though it was a
very nice bone-toss!" The first film Newman scored on his own was
Reckless
in 1984, but the young composer's breakthrough-movie was the
Madonna vehicle
Desperately Seeking Susan
in 1985. His rhythmic, ethnic flavored score was prominently featured and
drew much attention.

Like many contemporary film scores Newman's works are often a
fusion of orchestral and electronic techniques, such as his early scores
for
The Lost Boys
and
Less Than Zero.
Newman comments that he is fascinated by both orchestral and electronic
techniques. "I hate the notion that electronics are a cheesy way of
doing things and that orchestra is the 'only' true approach
to scoring. But you can understand those critics, because electronics
allow you to make easy choices, Anyone can do it. But while synthesizers
are things you hide behind sounds, they can also be put in places
you'd never expect. I've always wanted these boundaries to
be amorphous."

Another attention getter for Newman was his score for
The Rapture
, a controversial film about a hedonistic young woman who converts to
super-Fundamentalism and, at the film's bizarre climax, literally
ascends into heaven during the "end times." For this unusual
and extremely specialized feature Newman fused a chamber-sized ensemble of
acoustic instruments with ambient electronic sounds and colors. He
continued his fusion experiments with his next film,
Men Don't Leave
, and later commented: "I learned on those scores by trial and
error."

Newman's first mainstream Hollywood film was
Scent of a Woman
in 1992. The composer's experimental sound crystallized with this
and ensuing major scores, and it was soon to earn him numerous awards and
nominations. His critically acclaimed scores for
Little Women
and
The Shawshank Redemption
were both nominated for Academy Award in the same year, and he was also
nominated for
Unstrung Heroes
in 1995.

A 1995
Entertainment Weekly
review of the Sony Classical CD release of Newman's score for
Little Women
commented: "Pastiche-Copland often sounds tired, but Thomas
Newman's glowing score to the latest version of
Little Women
proves that it can also, occasionally, be inspired. If Newman's
score works so miraculously well, it may be because he seems to have
peppered the Coplandisms with canny seasonings from Charles Ives, the mad
genius of Danbury, Connecticut." The following year the same
publication commented on the CD
from
The People vs. Larry Flint
: "This elegant and austere orchestral score by Thomas Newman
becomes progressively more abstract and brooding, absorbing the country,
gospel, and pop songs studding the album."

However, in a
New Republic
review of
Meet Joe Black
, Stanley Kauffmann complained that "Thomas Newman's music
should not pass without a protest: it's the nosiest compilation of
bangs and surges in several weeks." It might also be noted that the
complaints of elder critic Kauffmann were not dissimilar to certain
grumblings voiced against another young genius of modern film music, Elmer
Bernstein, in the early 1950s.

Contemporary film music has changed radically from the days when
Newman's father, Alfred, created his legendary symphonic scores for
20th Century-Fox, and today's Hollywood composers often find
themselves providing supplementary instrumental scoring for a collection
of chart-hopeful pop-music chart tracks. While Thomas Newman does not
possess the readily recognizable style of his father and other classic
Golden Age musicians, he is an amazingly versatile musician with the
uncanny gift for creating a new and utterly appropriate sound for each new
film he scores. In addition to his AA nominations Newman has received five
BMI Music Awards, and several Grammy and Golden Globe nominations. Newman
was again nominated for an Oscar for his score for
American Beauty
, the film which won for Best Picture in 2000.

—Ross Care

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